Today, F8 was a great surprise for all of us. Mark Zuckerberg and his buddy, Bret Taylor, introduced us to their all-new Open Graph platform. In short, a platform that eventually can (and will, because of the huge Facebook’s brand) connect every website, company, service, band — everything — with Facebook.

The Social Graph is dead, long live Open Graph

But what exactly is the Open Graph? Until now, we all know the Social Graph. Well, Open Graph is Facebook’s huge social graph combined with the social graphs of other, third-party services and networks (like Yelp, as Zuck said — they didn’t mention Foursquare at all by the way).

It’s a semantically-aware, more open and social graph. In other words, a huge, combined, connected, immersive graph. Welcome, the Open social graph.

Scoble, is eventually proven right today with his last year’s post about the Facebook phases. We’re in the 6th one, moving to the 7th.

What backs up the new Open Graph?

Social Plugins Open Graph API & Protocol, as Zuck explained. New plugins and APIs are available to be added in your website with just a line of HTML.

The Open Graph Protocol is a new Semantic markup, something like this:

<meta property="og:title" content="Green Day" />

(don’t tell anyone, Green Day suck)

Plugins are the new Like, Activity feed, Login boxes and a bunch more little things that we add to our websites. The API is just what back-ups everything.

A great win

Facebook today said to all of us: resistance is futile. Their new platform is beyond awesome. If you can spell “new Internet” then you can spell Facebook, too. A powerful, yet simple platform for everyone to use. It can be the basis for great things in the future. With Open Graph, they just killed Twitter’s @anywhere platform announced at Chirp days ago. Facebook wants the whole internet connected with it. They beat Google with this now, they beat Twitter, they beat everyone. Quoted from Zuckerberg,

We’re building towards the web, where every application is social.

In only the first hour after the launch, Facebook will server 1 billion (1,000,000,000 — that’s huge!) new Like button clicks.

The whole thing starts to make sense now. That’s why Facebook didn’t want to open it’s public timeline.

What about Privacy though?

Facebook is like wanting to know every data about you and the world, in the whole wide Internet. Admit it, they’re very good at it.

They are going to personalize the Internet. They can. That’s what they do —  they do this now.

Also Facebook is showing the path to the future of APIs: iFrame for dummies and REST+JSON for the rest of the world. Perfect balance, or not?

Personally, I don’t want Facebook, when I click to Like something or to become a Fan or edit my interests, etc in my profile, to throw them up to this open platform or even to show them in public search, as they announced.

My profile is private, only I want to select the people (even websites) that will have access to it. I don’t want my Facebook data publicly available. You have to respect that Facebook. On the other hand, Twitter you’re good to go and make the Open Graph your way.

Thoughts on FOG

Well, this is a giant step forward. Facebook now kicks the competition with Google and Twitter. And at this point, they seem to win big time. If you don’t get it: Facebook basically told us they plan to take over the entire Internet. Disappointingly, they have a very good plan for it. They kick the whole Internet, it’s openness, neutrality, diversity and hacker culture in the butt. Seriously, not that of a cool thing to do, but they can.

They try to make Internet a monopoly. That’s a dislike for me.

A monopoly, that’s against the open hacker internet community. Open data my ass, Facebook. That’s open ad data. Seriously, I mean this.

One Graph to rule them all. All your base belong to us. Or to put it in a better way, all our base belong to them.

But in the end of the day, it won’t affect the 14-15-16-17-year-all teens that use Facebook in Greece and in the world? Will it? Nah.